Prometheus Metrics without Prometheus Server

January 06, 2018

At Latency.at we measure performance and availability of your sites and
services from multiple global locations and provides the results as Prometheus
metrics.

But that doesn’t mean you have to use a Prometheus Server to consume them. While
we’re big fans of the Prometheus Server, the simple and open exposition format
can be consumed by many other systems and is on it’s way to become the defacto
standard of metrics exposition.

DataDog

DataDog already supports retrieving metrics from Prometheus endpoints for some
of their checks. While they are working on generic
support,
currently a custom check is needed.
For this we wrote
datadog-agent-prometheus
which allows you to consume arbitrary Prometheus metrics in DataDog.

Once installed, you can retrieve Latency.at metrics into DataDog with a config
like this:

Sensu

Sensu supports scraping Prometheus metrics by using the Sensu Prometheus
Collector.
We submitted a PR to add support for the Authorization
header. You
can compile this yourself or wait until this gets merged and release. After
that, the Latency.at metrics can be consumed as any other Prometheus endpoint,
just make sure to specify the Authorization header in the check definition:

Support for `curl -H@-` was added recently in 7.55. Should you have an
older version, you have to use `-H Authorization: Bearer` instead. This though
will cause the token to show up in `ps` output to all users when run.

Please keep in mind: The Performance Data returned by check_http is about
the request to the Probes, not the request the prober does to your site. To
gather that, a custom nagios check would be required.